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India Hasn’t Learned a Thing from Mumbai

December 17th, 2008 Leave a comment Go to comments

It’s disheartening to see the foolishness we humans can’t seem to help perpetuating. India’s government is working on two new anti-terror laws.

One of them proposes setting up a National Investigation Agency with sweeping powers of investigation.

The second strengthens existing anti-terror laws to allow suspects to be detained without bail for up to six months on the orders of a judge.

Yep, I’m sure that if these had been passed a year ago, the (then) would-be terrorists would have chosen a different path. When you’re planning to take as many innocent lives as possible before your own death there’s nothing quite like the threat of a few months in jail to give you a sincere change of heart.

This is what happens when you have a liberal, more-government-is-better mindset. Instead of trusting the populace with their own protection (India has a virtual ban on civilian gun ownership) and fixing the problems with the existing law enforcement organizations (Mumbai police cowered outside while the attacks went on) you create a new government agency to deal with the problem. India already has a number of intelligence and security agencies…none of them were able to stop the Mumbai attacks in advance.

It will be argued that:

– We did the same thing by creating the Department of Homeland Security. That, too, was an unnecessary increase in the size of our government—not surprising since Bush has demonstrated through eight years of overspending and bloating government that he’s not a fiscal conservative except on taxes. We’ve been kept safe not by the DHS, but by our brave armed forces taking the fight overseas. Aargh! Love him and hate him in the same paragraph.

– Our existing agencies didn’t stop 9/11. True, but that’s because we didn’t learn anything (still haven’t, really) from the experience of Israel, which puts armed security on every El Al flight. If we’d had a functional Air Marshal program in place, 9/11 would likely have been averted. Since it would be prohibitively expensive to put AMs on every US flight, it should be noted that the same would be true if we simply allowed people with concealed carry licenses to take their weapons with them onboard. Terrorists simply wouldn’t know who (or how many) are armed and the potential success of such a hijacking would be extremely low.

It’s disheartening to see the foolishness we humans can’t seem to help perpetuating.

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